Wuthering Heights: A Social Evolution
Date
2014-01-15
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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Emily Bronte consciously decides to communicate with her readers indirectly in Wuthering Heights. Rather than employing a more heavy-handed omniscient narrator, Bronte conveys her narrative through the accumulation of a series of imperfect narrators. Lockwood, Nelly, Isabella, Linton and Zillah each tell a portion of their experience with Catherine and Heathcliff and Cathy and Hareton.1 In the process, they reveal their own solipsism and the method by which they justify their own actions and thoughts. Through this narrative method, Bronte effaces herself and allows us to interpret her characters with minimal provocation while she continues to manipulate their juxtaposition and the story's chronology. At the same time, her varied use of genre demonstrates the inadequacy of any one genre to express any meaningful social relationship. Romanticism, Gothicism and Elegiac Romanticism must all blend to convey her ideas to the reader effectively. Bronte's controlled use of solipsistic narration and varied genre types communicates an antisocial literary world that she can only evolve into a community after those who initially made up the world have perished, as I will demonstrate. As Lockwood closes the novel, Bronte forces us to confront our own method of interpretation thereby revealing her commentary, for in fact, Lockwood functions as we might if we were allowed to interpret the enframed story without being questioned about our method. In this paper, I will demonstrate how Emily Bronte comments on the nature of humanity by rejecting solipsism for society through a series of narratives and genres in Wuthering Heights
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39 pages
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